How Much Do I Write?

At my last book club meeting one of the guys asked if anyone had plans to write a book. Two of the guys in the club answered affirmative very quickly. I didn’t have a very good answer and reflected that I don’t think I could write a book. My friend Dan thought that was odd since I write regularly on my blog, doesn’t that make me sort of a writer already? He even suggested that I wrote more than anyone else in the group which resulted in quick dismissal from our academic colleagues who regularly write research papers.

So the question left was, how much do I write? Dan even prodded me with an email after the fact which left me with no option but to figure it out. :-)

I was able to find a WordPress plugin called Word Stats that made quick work of giving me a word count by month. I threw the data into a spreadsheet to clean it up slightly and make a quick graph. This only includes my writing on my blog.

I write an average of 2,631 words per month for a total of 226,235 words since February 2004. The highest month was July 2004 when I wrote 9,711 words. There were three months when I didn’t write anything: May 2004, August 2010 and October 2010. That graph really highlights that 2010 was a really quiet year for me. That is a trend I’m reversing in 2011.

I did some quick searches and the average novel has about 100,000 words in it. So, it seems I’ve written 2 novels here in the last 7 years. Pretty cool!

If you wish to play with numbers the CSV file of my stats is available.